In a sibling group, the youngest often tends to copy the oldest. Is it the same with divorces?
It’s anything but a joke. A group of researchers from the University of Antwerp, Belgium, conducted a study to seek to determine the influence of siblings on relationships and particularly on romantic breakups, including divorce and separation. And this shows surprising results. The authors of the study studied 67,000 couples and their brothers and sisters over a period of 20 years and discovered that a couple’s attitude can radically change after seeing a brother or sister divorce.
The results show that a couple will tend to persist if one member of the couple witnesses the separation of their brother or sister. This phenomenon would be further confirmed if the siblings have the same type of relationship (married or cohabiting) and if their members are close in age to each other. It would seem that if two brothers are both in a relationship, the romantic breakup of one of them will, in some way, tend to strengthen the relationship of the other.
One of the reasons for this would be that siblings “can influence each other on a wide spectrum of behaviors and life choices”, explain the researchers in their study. In childhood, the youngest child will tend to imitate his eldest child. In adulthood this relationship will disappear, because the proximity between the two diminishes. But a separation, according to researchers, tends to bring brothers and sisters, and more broadly, members of the same family or friends, closer together. And faced with the pain experienced by a loved one, or the story of an unhappy love experience, they will tend not to want to experience the same thing.
Another reason would be that the person still in a relationship would discover indirectly, through their brother or sister, the consequences of a breakup. “When people receive information about the divorce or separation experience of a loved one, such as a sibling, it can have a significant impact on their thoughts regarding marital dissolution,” the study says. This type of separation is often accompanied by financial, social and family tensions which add to the emotional impact of such a change of life.
The conclusions of these twenty years of testing show that these changes in relationships can make siblings who experience the breakup of their brother or sister more cautious. This caution would materialize in a desire not to reproduce the same pattern. Divorce or separation from a brother or sister would, in short, play a protective role over the duration of one’s own relationship.